Academic Superstition

Knowledge or Propaganda?

As I have watched economic issues transpire over the course of my life time, I have been overwhelmed by the absence of logic that consumes bureaucratic premises. In the presence of many educational scholars, commercial magnates, agents of government, and religious scholars, we have all witnessed crisis after crisis go unresolved, with no progress, no plan, and no procedure that has any possibility of succeeding. People blame others who point accusing fingers right back at them. All of this drama transpires in the midst of wealth. War, poverty, and injustice have been used to create obscene disproportionate wealth for thousands of years, and that trend still proceeds as if humanity had no compassion, and no brains. I believe what is gloomily portrayed as the natural cycle of history is not natural, and certainly not necessary.

Educators talk about economic complication that only they can understand, but are incapable of explaining, even to each other. Politicians argue like children to secure riches and power for themselves, and their constituents. Theologians tell us that God’s chosen ones are worthy of power and wealth that is undeserved by the remainder of the human family. These groups of people who control the source and flow of money are monetary sycophants who either don’t understand economics, or they ignore its absence because they believe they disproportionately benefit by denying it’s existence.

Your kindergarten teacher probably knew about economics. She taught you the basics. Try not to break anything. Be kind to your neighbor. Share. Everyone gets a turn. It will work best if we all help each other. Thank you for helping the ones who are unable to reach. You are a lucky person if you are surrounded by people who know as much about economics as your kindergarten teacher.

The reason economics looks hard is because the group gets bigger. The space gets bigger. The time span gets longer, and the number of resources increases and gets bigger and stranger. Even though you don’t know all of the people, and you have never been to their house, the economic rules are the same. Try not to break anything, and treat people kindly. Every time you have a chance to be helpful, take it. Others are helping you all of the time, and you don’t even know it. Economically we all help and protect each other.

That is all you need to know about economics. Everything that is economical protects or nourishes people, and the environment people live in. We all need to do our best to protect people, and nourish their environment. There is just one thing I need to warn you about.

Many educators, politicians, business tycoons and clergy, our leaders, either didn’t learn the economic lesson or they made a choice to ignore it. In fact the subject, natural economics doesn’t exist. The purpose of the natural economic skeleton that human knowledge hangs on isn’t treated as if it were even important, except in kindergarten.

The very people that we count on to make the economic decisions that we all have to live with, make really bad ones that leave many people depressed, endangered, hungry, homeless, abused, or prematurely expired.

Big institutions, bureaucracies, often pay well to have people do things that harm other people and their environment. Sometimes they do it because they don’t understand economics. Sometimes they make mistakes, because they are in a hurry, but usually they do it to make money, feel smug, and impress people, including their very rich leaders, who tempt them with more. They call this economic policy. They call it that to make people think they are not doing harm, and they are working for the benefit of people and the environment where we live. These institutions are doing harm, and their policies are not economic.

The word, economic, comes from an ancient greek word that means to take care of the family. Economics today is the whole human family. We all share. You, and every other family member is important. When they require extra care, such as when they are babies, or they are sick, or they are old and crippled, we still treat them well. We don’t blow them up, poison them, or starve them. If even one is missing, or in danger we try to rescue them. Economics is for everyone’s benefit, the whole world family. Please notice that behavior that doesn’t care for the family is not economic.

Bureaucratic institutions use GDP, “gross domestic product,” to measure the size of the economy. It doesn’t do that. Instead it uses academically unsupportable mathematics that adds the cost of economic benefit to an indeterminable part of the cost of economic harm. That is like adding your bank account to part of your bills. What gets measured? GDP is not an economic measurement, it is a Gosh Darn Prevarication. It hides harm that has already been done, and is being done to people and the environment, and it hides plans to do more harm.

Bureaucracies like expanding GDP. It increases their power over the people who depend on them. Expanding GDP increases the amount of money they can make. It also expands the harm that is done to people and the humaneness of their environment. GDP is used to mathematically misrepresent economics. Economics is the purpose of education. As it is currently practiced, it is a modern theme used to keep ancient superstitious academic beliefs alive. The academic medicine men lead with money, leaving education academically bankrupt as they hide knowledge and generate the superstitious propaganda that rushes to fill any educational vacuum.

Thomas Jefferson, Third US president, constitutional framer, and principal author of the US Declaration of Independence, said that people needed to be educated in order to pick good leaders and take care of each other, govern themselves. Clearly, that education should include economics. Not the fake kind that bureaucracies use to hide knowledge, or misinform us. That kind harms people and the environment. Genuine economics is the kind your kindergarten teacher taught you. Those basics of natural economics make people proud, happy, kind and competent. Everybody works together to help and protect each other. No one is left out and everybody waits for their turn.

It is fairly certain that superstitious academic beliefs did not constitute the necessary educational mandate that Jefferson referred to. Knowledge, not propaganda is what is required for responsible self-governance.

Here is a natural economic plan to rid the world of war, poverty, and injustice. Do no harm. Use economic knowledge and distribute economic knowledge. Expect leaders and institutions to clearly demonstrate theirs. Economic progress is demonstrated by economic behavior. Chaos is artificially created in its absence.

Education is the pursuit and distribution of knowledge and truth. Commerce is the distribution of goods and service. Government is an instrument of justice. Religion is the recognition of our relative insignificance and our need to rely on a higher authority to guide us, preserve us, and improve us. Economics uses those four institutions to create a cycle that produces a better environment for people, and better behavior by people for the environment. Economic success requires that each of those four disciplines be applied to our human environment with kindness, competence and clarity. That application is in the form of our behavior and the behavior of people that we choose to follow.

Religion, the fear of God, provides incentive for good behavior. Even if misbehavior can send you to hell, many people pay for misbehavior that they had no part in. Economically we all pay for each transgression. The absence of trustworthiness causes us to expel people from our economic family, people who then turn on us. The behavior of those with whom we align ourselves is as important as our individual behavior. Kind competent behavior produces a better environment that produces better behavior by us and our alliances. The absence of that kind competence erodes behavior, the critical elements for maintaining a healthy natural, physical, and human environment. The absence of those elements is the logical explanation for the existence of the historical cycle of war, poverty and injustice.

We use financial accounting to protect money, monetary interests. We must use behavioral accounting to protect the human environment including its resources, one of which is money. Money that is not spent to further the well being of humanity, harms humanity. That harm has a cost that makes money an ineffective economic tool. Try buying peace, justice, or happiness. As the human environment improves, the value of money increases. The economic purpose of money is to improve the human environment. When the human environment fails to improve, when injustice, poverty, and war still exist, the monetary system is funding failure.

Economic accounting accounts for establishing credible effort to do no harm and add human environmental benefit. The human environment is the only place that peace, justice, and happiness can exist or grow. Economics pays the bills in the human environment with money that has economic value or money that is so worthless that it won’t pay for what we need to exist. Neither will it pay forward for the benefit of children, and coming generations.

Academic institutions are allowing superstition to hijack economics. I am not the first to notice the farce that academically passes as economics. Ask yourself is there any credible plan to lift all people from poverty, stop injustice, or eradicate war? Are poverty, injustice, and war desirable in your family? Dodging bullets, competing for food and shelter, searching for clean water, and trying to find a clean place to raise a family in a human garbage heap, offers no rewards worth pursuing other than temporary relief from the depression and despair that will ultimately return to claim its prize.

Education distributes knowledge. Distributing falsehoods is propaganda. Propaganda about economics is being used to mimic education. Propaganda is a bureaucratic tool that forces us to pledge allegiance to bureaucrats, false gods, that ask us to harm others in order to protect ourselves. All education must be rooted in our economics. Education teaches people how to serve and protect each other. That is its purpose. Propaganda does harm and it fails to competently provide benefits, certainly not justice, or well-being.

The bureaucracies don’t want us to govern ourselves. They want us to be their slaves. They hijacked their assigned institutional missions in favor of greed. Education was to determine and distribute truth. Commerce was to share. Government was to protect us, distribute justice, and well being. And, religion was to be a guide that gave our existence relevance, quality, and endurance. Economics ties all of those missions together. It is a practical solution that allows the behavior of individuals to improve the environment for humanity. Improving the human environment improves human behavior, which further improves the environment…

Individually people are incompetent. Can you make your clothes, your shoes, your house, your transportation? Can you protect yourself from foreign invasion or domestic home intrusion? How about health services, can you remove your own appendix, or repair cavities in your teeth? We need our institutions. They are part of our human environment. The individuals that work for them, work cooperatively for improvement. It is the job of every individual worker including administration to do no harm while they clearly work for the benefit of others who need their services.

Economic behavioral accounting holds the individuals within institutions accountable for the absence of harm and the presence of benefit at the point of inception. Once behavior is institutionalized, sub economic behavior is easily hidden. Bureaucracies have a life of their own that competes for space in the human environment. These ancient bureaucratic beasts were not meant to inhabit the earth at the same time as civilized humanity. Bureaucratic beasts or humanity, only one will survive.

Throughout our history we have had the choice to serve humanity, or the bureaucratic beasts who enslave it. Knowledge provides solid ground for good choices. Propaganda teaches us to ignore both ethics and facts. It is a brand new day in history. Will we make better choices this time?